After years of delays on workforce development, Kasich heads to Davos to tout his “success”

Kasich is in Davos Switzerland this week for the World Economic Forum. As Marc Niquette reports, Kasich will use the opportunity to “discuss his efforts to align education and training with available jobs.”

It should be a very interesting speech given the many accomplishments Kasich had made it this area.

Let’s review:

During the Gubernatorial campaign of 2010, Kasich announced plans to overhaul Ohio’s workforce development program.

Kasich took office in January 2011 but waited an entire year to announce a workforce development czar.

I’m going to have this thing called the workforce training reform plan. I mean, it sounds like – I don’t even like to give them these names, but here is what it is, this guy Rich Frederick that works for me, he is reporting directly to me. He is going to change the whole thing. We’re going to do metrics, how the community colleges, the technical schools — by the way, let’s bring vocational education back strong in our K-through-12 education, bring it back.

Nine months later, in November 2012, Frederick was quietly let go. Frederick had been paid $7,000 a month for his service. But as far as we can tell, none of the goals identified in Kasich’s State of the State had been accomplished at the time of Frederick’s departure.

Later that same month, and nearly two years since taking office, Kasich took a second swing at Workforce Development: announcing he was appointing a 25 member workforce development panel tasked with achieving the same goals he’d announced a year earlier.

Since them , the only thing we’ve heard about is the possibility that the newly-renamed Development Services Agency will be doling out training vouchers to people who are already employed, or to the companies that employee them, with little oversight of guidance on how that money will be spent.

Kasich waited a whole year to tackle workforce development. And his first false-start with Frederick pushed the effort back nearly another year. Kasich currently has zero workforce development achievements under his belt and yet he’s flying to Switzerland to tell the world about his “success”?

Good luck with that Governor.

To be fair, Kasich staff spent much of their first two years reassigned help the failed, anti-union, Senate Bill 5 campaign and to the oust-Dewine effort which gave Kasich control of Ohio Republican Party.

So it should be no surprise that Workforce Development was pushed to the back burner.